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I return to the darkness in the valley, and I’m alone and flowing away in the nothingness, and I’m alone in the cabin and the presence in light or whatever you, Eric, tried to explain to me is nowhere to be found. There’s no light. There never was. There’s only emptiness and lack and void and it all explains why the world is the way it is and I would scream if I could.
On the terrible screen, the one always filled with apocalypses big and small, breaking news has already interrupted the bird flu program. On the terrible, awful screen is the smoking wreckage of an airplane. The smoke is thick and the deepest black, a writhing toxic column that billows and expands into a cloud, a mass, a tumor in the sky. Quick cut to an aerial shot of the crash site and debris is scattered in the grassy field like confetti. Quick cut to another wrecked plane cratered in the middle of another field. There is more black smoke, and within its hypnotic undulations I know there is
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Maybe the truth is the end has already been happening long before we arrived at the cabin and what we’re seeing, what we’ve been seeing, is not the fireworks of the world’s denouement but the final flickering sparks of our afterword.
We can’t go on. We stare at the television. The hole in the screen is a porthole in a sunken boat. It’s an open mouth ringed in rows of small, asymmetrical, jagged teeth and it once spoke of unimaginable places and things. It’s a wound, one from which the blackest ichor will begin flowing. It’s a telescopic view of the universe before stars, or after.
Eric stares at the screen as though he is afraid to look elsewhere; the very act of staring is a talisman that already failed to protect us. He has Wen in his arms and he sways in rhythm with the frenzied buzz of flies echoing from inside the hole. Only one of us ever hears and sees these flies just as only one of us saw a figure in light.
For as long as he lives, Andrew will wonder if Eric partly blames him for Wen’s death because of his unwitting part in the hellish Rube Goldberg device that took over our lives, because he snuck the gun up to the cabin, because the gun was in his hand, because his finger was on the trigger, because he couldn’t stop the trigger from being pulled. The lump of the handgun, the cold machine, is in his back pocket. Andrew’s hands are currently filled with the wooden handle of the cursed weapon O’Bannon made. He wishes to hold Wen instead.
Eric says, “I said we can go now.” “I know. We’re going.” We say the right words again, but we don’t move. We stand there. Now that Sabrina is the only one of them left and unarmed, we’re more afraid of what we are thinking and of what the other one of us is thinking. We’re afraid for each other and we’re afraid of ourselves. How can we go on? At this shared thought, we turn away from the television screen and away from each other.
The air is warm and humid, ready to burst. Wind rattles through the trees and small waves lap at the lakeshore below. The gray sky is a smear, a Neuromancer sky, dead and anachronistic.
What Andrew wants is to have Wen back and to have Eric be his Eric and not this brain-bashed proto-zombie. And if he can’t have that, then he wants to sit down and cry and never move again. He wants to cover himself with the blanket, the one that used to belong to us, used to be ours. He wants to tie Sabrina to the deck railing and leave her behind forever. He wants to know what exactly is going on in Eric’s concussed head. He wants to yell and lash out at Eric for defending anything Sabrina says. He wants to take Wen away from Eric; rip her out of his hands.
Eric is on the couch with Wen’s body across his lap. It’s as though the trip to the deck didn’t happen and no one has moved and nothing has changed. And just like that Andrew’s energy dissipates and a near-incapacitating sadness and despair swells at the realization that even after we walk out the front door, part of us will be trapped in the cabin and in these positions forever.
She lifts her right knee until her foot is flush against the floor and she stands smoothly and without much effort. She turns and flashes a friendly, I’m-on-your-side smile that slides into pity, an ugly transformation familiar to us both.
It’s darker outside now than it was only minutes ago, and windier. The cloud cover is charcoal tinted. The cabin and surrounding trees block any attempt at distance viewing. At least from the deck, we could see across the lake to the forest and mountains and more easily imagine the wider world beyond us, beyond what we saw on the television. Without the elevated perspective, the front yard is the bottom of a grasshopper jar.
Maybe it’s a mistake to be outside, attempting to leave, acting like we can simply go on.
“When this is over and when we are safe, I am going to throw this gun into the woods or the lake or preferably a bottomless pit.” “I’ll help you find one and we’ll throw it in there together,” Eric says. It comes out too eager and sentimental, so it feels like such a damned and obvious lie. Andrew reloading that gun, the gun, and then Eric’s awkward attempt at commiseration is yet another microevent within the greater, grander days of horror and evil that will mark us whether we live another sixty seconds or sixty years, together or apart.
“What if it’s all real?” “But it’s not, I—” “Andrew!” Eric yells and Andrew jerks his head in surprise. Eric wants to pull the gun away from Andrew’s chest and nestle it back under his own chin. But the gun stays where it is, and Eric implores, repeating his question. “What if it’s all real?” Andrew inhales, and his defiant answer is in the exhale. “If it is. Then it is. We’re still not going to hurt each other.” “What will we do? We can’t go on.” “We’ll go on.” We stare, and we watch the rain and we watch our faces, and we don’t say anything, and we say everything. Eric pulls the gun off
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If a novel is to have a thesis statement then this one has two. The last line of the novel is one and the following line is the other: “As though everyday people have nothing but love in their hearts and are always reasonable and have never committed atrocities in the name of their self-proclaimed everydayness.”
I thought it was especially important to dip into Sabrina’s POV. I do not want readers sympathizing with the invaders. But I did think their experience was a horror worth exploring: the horror of feeling like you have no freedom and no choice. That’s a horror partly because abdicating personal responsibility is kind of attractive. Living without conscience, maintaining that you have no choice because of a set of beliefs, I imagine, could be quite intoxicating. That break with the social compact is terrifying to me.
My defiant hope for you is that this book ultimately becomes about the choice Eric and Andrew make and not whether or not the world is actually ending. I mean, shit, their world has already been definitively shattered, don’t you think? It’s about the choice: do they and do we choose fear or that most defiant of all hopes, love?
